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Growing up in Asia in a particular time period - the '50s and '60s - I attended a Catholic missionary school where I was taught by nuns and where consciousness of the body was repressed. Yet at the same time, the female body was a highly visible and sensitive site.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

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Shirley Geok-lin Lim
Age: 79
Born: 1944
Born: December 27
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Malacca City
Body
Period
Repressed
Time
Periods
Asia
Female
Missionary
Consciousness
Site
Particular
Highly
Taught
Visible
Nuns
Growing
Sensitive
Nun
School
Catholic
Attended

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The foot can march or it can dance, but it cannot stand still until end-stopped.
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The body in defense against male appropriation expresses itself through work in writing, and the work in writing produces the book. So it's a different form of creation and generation that may be viewed as creation without male contribution as a component or challenge.
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The poem might come to you as you're preparing to teach a lecture, right? And when you say, no to that occasion, that poem is gone.
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I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place of the female body.
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I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless.
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Note, the reply will not be I write, an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.
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No one, evidently, except me has found No Alarms poem ironical that an obsessive theme in my writing was - and has continued to be - not being able to write.
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I was driven, as have been many writers, both by a repulsion of the childhood home's narrow confines and a desire to reach further, to keep desiring more of a future not yet imagined and not yet written down.
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Stop Already is a fairly new poem in a group that was just published by Feminist Studies, which is why I sent them to you.
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If you've been in a symbolic struggle long enough, even when the struggle is over, you don't know it's over.
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When I spoke at the 2012 Contemporary Women Writers' Conference in Taipei, I thought it offered an appropriate moment and site to announce my new manifesto10 and profession - to be a writer.
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I'm surrounded by men, and the muse is complaining that I have neglected her.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.
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If I could write a novel while I'm walking, I probably would.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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Philosophy is a bad master for poetry religion worse and politics self-serving will never serve the Muse.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim
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As a first-generation Asian American woman, for one thing, I knew there was no such thing as an Asian American woman. Within this homogenizing labeling of an exotica, I knew there were entire racial/national/cultural/sexual-preferenced groups, many of whom find each other as alien as mainstream America apparently finds me.
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John Milton famously claimed, Fame is the spur for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur.
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Even today, I'm much more comfortable dressed in a male kind of way.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim